Scale Your Business With Data with Crawford McMillan
Scale Your Business With Data with Crawford McMillan
Podcast Description
The Scale Your Business with Data podcast is the no-fluff guide for leaders who know there’s money buried in their data but need a proven map to dig it up—fast.
Hosted by Graham Crawford (co-founder of Crawford MacMillan and longtime “data whisperer” for high-growth teams), each weekly episode distills decades of front-line experience into conversations you can act on immediately. Forget buzzwords and theoretical frameworks; this show zeroes in on the real-world moves that turn:
- Chaotic spreadsheets into clear signals, so you see which levers actually drive revenue, margin, and customer loyalty.
-Everyday metrics into decision intelligence, so you stop debating dashboards and start reallocating budgets, products, and people with confidence.
-Expensive AI hype into practical advantage, learn how to define and govern data first, then layer automation without sacrificing explainability or control.
-“Hope” strategies into repeatable playbooks—so multi-million-dollar calls happen in minutes, not months.
Whether you’re scaling a startup, steering a Fortune-500 unit, or simply tired of dashboards that look good but do nothing, you’ll walk away each week with:
-Actionable insights you can deploy before the next meeting.
-Battle-tested stories that de-risk your own transformation.
-A clearer mental model for leading people, processes, and technology around data—not the other way around.
-No jargon, no ivory-tower theory—just candid talk, unexpected analogies, and an unwavering focus on value creation.
Subscribe today and join a community that turns hidden numbers into breakout growth.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast explores a range of topics focused on data strategy, decision intelligence, and AI implementation. Episodes cover practical aspects such as transforming chaotic spreadsheets into clear signals for revenue growth, optimizing corporate KPIs, and utilizing data for effective decision-making. For instance, one episode features Nick White discussing how data strategy can bridge the gap between data collection and actionable insights, enhancing business performance.
Private equity meets data. Conversations with deal teams, operating partners, and portfolio company leaders about the data problems that kill deals, slow exits, and destroy value.
Hosted by Graeme Crawford, founder of Crawford McMillan. 20 years leading data programs at Fortune 100 companies. Now helping PE-backed companies fix data before exits so the numbers hold up under scrutiny.
New episodes cover diligence red flags, value creation playbooks, and the real stories behind successful (and failed) transactions.
In this episode I talk with Afrozy Ara, founder and CEO of LuminaData, an AI transformation platform for finance operations backed by Techstars and Berkeley SkyDeck. Afrozy started her career as an electrical engineer, then spent over a decade in enterprise consulting at firms including Mu Sigma, where she worked directly with Fortune 500 finance teams and built out diagnostic practices that benchmark how finance work actually happens inside large organizations. She started LuminaData a year and a half ago, beginning with a single problem inside reconciliations, and her founding thesis is that AI adoption is not the same as AI transformation.
We talk about where the money actually hides inside a finance team, from duplicate invoices and unpaid remittances to the nonstandard contracts that large customers like Amazon force onto their vendors. Afrozy explains why giving a team of ten people the same AI tool can produce ten different answers without a shared process behind them, and why she still keeps a human in the loop for every exception rather than letting an agent make deterministic decisions on its own. She also walks through the three step method her team uses inside a client: look across the whole business, pick one area and go deep, then show a small result fast to build trust before scaling the work across the order to cash process.
Chapters:
- 00:19 – The Agent: Reimagining Your Process
- 04:11 – Thesis: AI adoption is not AI transformation
- 08:15 – AI in the Enterprise — From Copilots to Capturing Value
- 20:56 – Humans in the Loop: Designing AI Agents with Human Oversight
- 25:05 – Connecting platforms to reveal business performance and KPIs
- 33:21 – Personal Writing, Unfinished Books, and AI
Companies Mentioned
LuminaData
Techstars
Berkeley SkyDeck
Mu Sigma
Capital One
Amazon
Ramp
Brex
QuickBooks
Anthropic
Websites Mentioned
linkedin.com/in/afrozy-ara-57527612
Guest Information
Afrozy Ara is the founder and CEO of LuminaData, an AI platform for finance operations backed by Techstars and Berkeley SkyDeck. She began her career as an electrical engineer before moving into enterprise consulting, spending over a decade at firms including Mu Sigma, where she partnered with Fortune 500 finance teams on data and process problems. She started LuminaData a year and a half ago, beginning with a single problem inside reconciliations, and her work today centers on her belief that AI adoption is not the same as AI transformation. You can find Afrozy on LinkedIn.
Guest’s Full Name: Afrozy Ara
Company / Organization: LuminaData
Website or Main Page: Not provided
Guest Social Media Links:https://www.linkedin.com/in/afrozy-ara-57527612/
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